Here Are The Most Common Mistakes You Might Make When Choosing a Password

According to a new study by a researcher at Virginia Tech and Dashlane, a popular password manager service, most users make the same mistakes when making passwords, such as making their password the name of a popular brand or sports team.

And while these things make passwords easy to remember, they aren’t all that secure, and make passwords easily guessable by hackers.

The study evaluated 6.1 million anonymized passwords gathered by Gang Wang, a computer science researcher at Virginia Tech, and analysed by Dashlane.

Those passwords come from the massive troves of user personal data that have been leaked in data breaches over the years.

Here are the most common patterns and mistakes people make, and what you should avoid:

Recycling the same password (or modifying it slightly) for every website

According to Wang’s initial study, more than half of users reused the same password from site to site or modified it slightly.

“It is difficult for humans to memorise unique passwords for the 150+ accounts the average person has,” Wang said in a statement.

“Inevitably, people reuse or slightly modify them, which is a dangerous practice. This danger has been amplified by the massive data breaches which have given attackers more effective tools for guessing and hacking passwords.”

Password walking

Password walking refers to the practice of using combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols that are adjacent to one another on the keyboard, like “qwerty” and “123456.”

Here are some other common password walking Dashlane researchers found: